Context Sensitivity in Canadian and Japanese Children’s Judgments of Emotion

Do Surrounding People's Emotions Affect Judgment of the Central Person's Emotion? Comparing Within Cultural Variation in Holistic Patterns of Emotion Perception in the Multicultural Canadian Society

Previous studies in cultural psychology have suggested that when assessing a target person's emotion, East Asians are more likely to incorporate the background figure's emotion into the judgment of the target's emotion compared to North Americans. The objective of this study was to further examine cultural variation in emotion perception within a culturally diverse population that is representative of Canada's multicultural society. We aimed to see whether East-Asian Canadians tended to keep holistic tendencies of their heritage culture regarding emotion perception. Participants were presented with 60 cartoon images consisting of a central figure and four surrounding figures and were then asked to rate the central figure's emotion; out of the four cartoon figures, two were female and two were male. Each character was prepared with 5 different emotional settings with corresponding facial expressions including: extremely sad, moderately sad, neutral, moderately happy, and extremely happy. Each central figure was surrounded by a group of 4 background figures. As a group, the background figures either displayed a sad, happy, or neutral expression. The participant's task was to judge the intensity of the central figures' happiness or sadness on a 10-point Likert scale ranging from 0 (not at all) to 9 (extremely). For analysis, we divided the participants into three groups: European Canadians (N = 105), East Asian Canadians' (N = 104) and Non-East Asian/Non-European Canadians (N = 161). The breakdown for the Non-East Asian/Non-European Canadian group is as follows: 94 South Asian Canadians, 25 Middle Eastern Canadians, 23 African Canadians, 9 Indigenous Canadians, and 10 Latin/Central/South American Canadians. Results comparing European Canadians and East Asian Canadians demonstrated cultural variation in emotion judgment, indicating that East Asian Canadians were in general more likely than their European Canadian counterparts to be affected by the background figures' emotion. The study highlights important cultural variations in holistic and analytic patterns of emotional attention in the ethnically diverse Canadian society. We discussed future studies which broaden the scope of research to incorporate a variety of diverse cultural backgrounds outside of the Western educational context to fully comprehend cultural variations in context related attentional patterns.

Context-Sensitivity Influences German and Chinese Preschoolers’ Comprehension of Indirect Communication

Making inferences in communication is a highly context-dependent endeavor. Previous research found cultural variations for context-sensitivity as well as for communication comprehension. However, the relative impact of culture and context-sensitivity on communication comprehension has not been investigated so far. The current study aimed at investigating this interplay and tested 4- and 6-year-old children from Germany ( n = 132) and China ( n = 129). Context-sensitivity was measured with an adapted version of the Ebbinghaus illusion. In this task, children have to discriminate the size of two target circles that only appear to be of similar size due to context circles surrounding the target circles. As expected, performance scores indicated higher degrees of context-sensitivity in Chinese compared to German children and that 6-year-olds were more context-sensitive than 4-year-olds. Further, in an object-choice communication-comprehension task, children watched videos with puppets performing every-day activities (e.g., pet care) and had to choose between two options (e.g., dog or rabbit). A puppet expressed what she wanted either directly (“I want the rabbit”) or indirectly (“I have a carrot”). The children had to choose one option to give to the puppet. In both cultures, 6-year-olds outperformed 4-year-olds and children understood direct communication better than indirect communication. Culture was found to affect children’s processing speed of direct communication. Moreover, culture influenced children’s context-sensitivity while context-sensitivity influenced children’s accuracy in the indirect (but not the direct) communication task. These findings demonstrate that taking context into account is especially important when we are confronted with indirect communication.

Different types of focus: Caregiver-child interaction and changes in preschool children's attention in two cultures

Social contexts shape the development of attention; however, little is known about joint attention beyond infancy. This study employed behavioral and eye-tracking measurements to investigate cultural variations in how caregivers direct 3- to 4-year-old children's attention and subsequent changes in children's attention to objects and contextual backgrounds in the United States (predominantly non-Hispanic Whites) and Japan (N = 60 mother-child dyads, 29 girls, 31 boys). The findings revealed that caregivers directed children's attention to culturally sensitive information, and significant cross-cultural differences in attention emerged after caregiver-child interaction, with Japanese children shifting their attention to the backgrounds. Results provide new insights into the role of social interaction and cultural diversity in the development of attention.

Culture and emotion perception: comparing Canadian and Japanese children's and parents' context sensitivity

Prior research on the perception of facial expressions suggests that East Asians are more likely than North Americans to incorporate the expressions of background figures into their judgment of a central figure's emotion (Masuda et al. in J Pers Soc Psychol 94:365-381, 2008b). However, little research has examined this issue in the context of developmental science, especially during joint sessions where parents engage in a task in front of their 7-8-year-old children. In this study, 22 Canadian and 20 Japanese child-parent dyads participated in an emotion judgment task, and were asked to judge a central figure's emotion and explain their reasoning. The results indicated that while early elementary school children did not show culturally dominant reasoning styles, parents displayed culturally dominant modes of attention, serving as models for their children.